Story Creation process

The story creation process always begins with creating the story narrative first, typically built by interviewing people who know the story to be told. From the story narrative, different deliverables can be created, including blogs, customer case studies, solution overviews, videos and customer facing presentations.

Phase 1: Setup

Identify story to be told

  • Who is the customer that the story will be written about?
  • What story do you want to tell?
  • What will be the deliverable(s)?
  • See example deliverables
  • Identify who will be on the team to review content?

Identify expert(s) to be interviewed

  • Who knows the story you want to tell?
  • An expert is typically a person on the winning sales team, an internal subject matter expert or the customer

Schedule expert(s) to be interviewed

  • Schedule 45 minute interview
  • The process usually requires only 1 interview, but can span to 2 or more if necessary
  • (Optional) Send high level interview questions to expert(s) being interviewed (available upon request)

Phase 2: Creation

Conduct interview

  • Vince usually conducts the interview, but the story can also be created from the recording of someone else doing the recorded interview.
  • Obtain any other supporting documents (e.g., published blogs, presentation decks) relevant to helping to create the story
  • Story content can also be sourced from existing content and not from an interview if enough source content exists

Create story narrative

  • Vince will take the raw interview transcript and working line by line will create the entire story told by the person(s) being interviewed
  • This process is fairly time consuming, as the entire transcript is used to capture the complete story told through the interview
  • Although time consuming, this process ensures we capture the complete story told by the expert(s), which facilitates the creation of better final deliverables

Create deliverable(s)

  • Vince will create a v1 version for the requested deliverable. Without expedition, this process normally takes approximately 1 week.
  • V1 will not be copy edited, but rather is typically used to ensure the story being created is the story wanting to be told
  • After feedback is received from the review team, a subsequent v2 will be created. We will continue this process of feedback / edits until the story meets expectations. We usually need 1-2 days to create a next revision
  • At this point, the story deliverable will go through copy and editorial edit. This output will be sent to the review team for a last final review. This process normally takes 2-3 days to complete